Reflections by award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett, author of many books about the sea

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Thursday, July 6, 2017

What would you do to make your favorite author finish a book?

It's a hot, hot, sweaty day on the French version of the autobahn. There are three grizzling, whining kids in the back, and your wife is doing her best, but getting desperate.

And you are on the way to your holiday house. Sounds good? No, it's a wreck of a stone cottage in the countryside, and you are going to spend the whole of your vacation trying to bring it up to scratch.

Including filling a dangerous well where your kids might fall down and die.

Your name is Michel.

You take the chance of a petrol stop to call into the bathroom and rinse your face with cold water. And when you look up, there is this very respectable, buttondown type guy looking at you. He smiles. He looks too long and he smiles too long, and he moves too close.

He's a school friend. Michel can't remember him in the slightest, but he brings up all kinds of memories -- the girl they both scored with, the poem in the class magazine (which he quotes without a quaver), and the novel Michel never finished.

He's Harry. And he wants to help.

Somehow, Harry and his girlfriend (Plum) end up at the wreck of a vacation house for dinner. So, he,with Michel and his lovely wife, Claire, and their three whining children, finds that Michel's parents have left them a present.

A totally ick shocking pink bathroom.

Can you imagine anything more ghastly in an old stone cottage? Michel can't. And neither can Harry.

Then Michel's car breaks down. So Harry (who has endless funds) buys him a new SUV. With air conditioning. Perhaps significantly, it is red.

And so it goes. Ever and ever downward, as the suspense builds up.

The ending is a shocker. And yet satisfying. The producers have marketed it as a Hitchcock- type thriller, but it is much, much more than that.

Watch it. The film is called, HARRY, HE WANTS TO HELP, and you can get it with English subtitles.